Baskerville, G.L. 1997. Advocacy, science, policy, and life in the
real world. Conservation Ecology [online] 1(1): 9. Available
from the Internet. URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol1/iss1/art9/Perspective, part of Special Feature on Science, Policy, and Advocacy Forum

Advocacy, Science, Policy, and Life in the Real World

Is ecological advice unsafe practice for regional management of
ecosystems? That is what Gordon Baskerville suggests in the following
Perspective, but seven commentators with experience in both science and policy
enrich and challenge that view.

Disruption of the structure and function of ecological systems constitutes a
set of major problems for contemporary society. It is straightforward to
conclude that the actions of humankind that create these problems are
improperly, or insufficiently, informed. By that, I mean the problems were not
created with malice aforethought, but rather were/are largely the result of
inadequate reflection before action. In areas with which I have some
familiarity, this inadequacy appears to derive primarily from two sources: (1)
weakness of models (of the mind or in a computer) used to create the forecasts
that underlie the design of management of forests and of related environmental
systems, and (2) insufficient attention to, or impossibility of following,
those forecasts during implementation. People do not make dumb choices, so
much as they choose from among dumb forecasts and/or make insufficient
effort to ensure that the actions are invoked to "cause" the chosen forecast to
happen.

Actions follow on decisions, and a decision is a choice among forecasts. It
is rare that a manager making a decision chooses to implement a forecast for a
bad future. Thus, in a failed decision, it is common that the decision maker
chose a "best" forecast that was not functionally coherent; implementing
the actions of that forecast, therefore, could not create the putative
future (Raffia 1968).

As a society, we seem to converge on pathological gridlock with respect to
linking economics and ecology in decision making. Ecological evaluation too
frequently assumes (usually unconsciously) that there are no costs to be borne
in an "ecological" action/constraint. On the other hand, the purely economic
approach to decision making assumes ecology away by merely maximizing net
present value as measured in dollars, subject, when necessary, to constraint "for
environmental protection." When ecological science does not enter this
computation, there is no basis for testing the forecast of the decision with
respect to dynamics of the system. Thus, it is common that failure of a
decision results in damage to the system, without benefit of learning by the
manager, which, in the final analysis, is the place where learning counts. The
opportunity to learn exists whenever expectation does match reality, but the
quality of learning depends heavily on how clearly the functional basis for the
expectation is stated a priori.

In this context, ecological science has not been, and is not now, of much
help to the manager who must decide and who wants to learn from each
decision. Ecological science seems to be tied up in describing what things look
like, rather than in discovering how systems function. Problems in managing
resource systems do not lie in what the systems look like, in general, but rather in how the system being managed functions. In a world
where everyone who so chooses is an expert in ecology, the meaning of the word
and, more importantly, the meaning of the science, seems tragically lost.

In forestry, more and more land is withdrawn from timber production and more
and more constraints are placed on harvesting and silviculture
to preserve "the ecology." Frequently, existing mill capacity is rendered
nonsustainable by ecological zoning. In my experience, it is rare to
encounter industrial resistance to these changes where the case is made in
science. The credibility of ecological science is, however, stretched.
Replacing "bad" practices with presumed "good" practices on "ecological"
grounds (i.e., it is known that the replacement practice is"good" out
of the context of natural system dynamics) too frequently results in even more
damage to the system, no learning about the dynamics of that system, and a loss
of the "ecologist's" credibility in the eyes of the manager.

Boothroyd (1978) defined management as articulate intervention, with the crucial
element being "reflection before action." The reflection is on how the subject
system is structured, how it functions, and, how it is likely to respond to
intervention. Although written from different perspectives, Boothroyd's reflection
before action is similar to the role of forecasts in informing a
decision (Raffia 1968) and to the idea of adaptive management as advanced
by Holling (1979) and by Walters (1986). For these authors, goodness or
badness of tools lies only in context of the dynamics of the
system upon which interventions are directed to solve a problem in system
performance.

Contemporary ecology seldom advocates or facilitates reflection before action.
There can be no doubt that ecologically naive policies of the past (and
present) exacerbate problems in achieving sustainability of the natural systems
humankind chooses to develop for economic purposes. However, intelligent use
of ecological reasoning in contemporary problem solving and future building,
with respect to natural resources management, is hard to find. Perhaps it is
smothered in the so-called optics of communication. There is plenty of theory,
and an abundance of blunt instruments (stop signs), but not much thoughtful
exercise of ecological science thinking, and not much reflection before action.
This is true even if one allows that theory gets published, while practice just
gets done. One is moved to paraphrase an old saying "ecology is used in
resource and environmental management much as a drunk uses a lamp post: more
for support than for illumination."

Although there is no shortage of research on the hot ecological topics in
resource management, most is descriptive. From the point of view of a
manager, not much addresses system dynamics, is integrative, or is capable of
being integrated across the range of temporal and spatial scales required in
designing forest management. Not much contemporary ecological research seems
to be targeted at understanding natural system dynamics at the scales
at which they function and are encountered by a manager, or at
building usable scientific constructs of dynamics at those scales to inform
management of resource and environmental systems. Holling (1995) has noted
this problem of temporal and spatial scales, both in studying and in regulating
ecological systems.

Relative to the design of forest-level management, far too few contemporary
science papers are usable building blocks in evolving a science of
forest system dynamics and management. Scientific papers on
forest resource issues all contain a statement averring that "this information
is essential to protecting the ecology of... ," or "is necessary for management
of... ." However encouraged the manager might be by such introductions, he/she
will quickly find yet another anecdotal description, outside any framework of scientific theory useful in designing management of the unique
system the manager faces.

Commonly, papers are comprised of observations out of temporal/spatial context.
Few address processes at the time and spatial scales of forest system
dynamics, or are written in contexts understandable to a manager who must think about change in a forest of 200,000 ha over a time horizon of about one century into the future. Most research is not within a coherent body of scientific knowledge that is identifiable and accessible to a manager. Perhaps most importantly, the so-called building block papers are out of context of the dynamics in whole systems to which they might be applied (if that were possible) in a management context. Presumably, the manager is supposed to assemble the "blocks" himself/herself.

Management of natural systems involves interventions in those systems,
sometimes to alter system structure, and always to alter system
evolution. When management is undertaken, it is, by definition, with the intent
of causing some part of the system to evolve differently than it would without
management. Because of the costs involved, management is undertaken only when
it appears that value in some form can be gained/retained, commensurate with the
costs of managing.

As one who has had occasion to employ ecological reasoning, in the design of
treatments of local stands in a forest and to design strategies for whole
forests, I worry that "ecological science" has become an unsafe practice.
Local observations at one moment are used continually as a basis for stating where
whole classes of systems are going. The public, and resource managers, have
difficulty distinguishing ecological science from pop ecology. That is, system
state, system structure, and system function have become thoroughly confused
with what an element of a local system looks like now.

Although science has not been of much help to the manager of natural systems,
scientists are at the forefront in prescribing rules for wrong actions to
avoid, and right actions to take. In most instances, this advice has been (is)
generic. That is, the advice is not state dependent, in the sense of first
analyzing the emerging problem in the context of dynamics in that particular stand
or particular forest system, and then choosing an intervention to invoke a
dynamic system response that will correct the problem. Managers
wonder how scientists, who limit their study to narrow temporal and spatial
scopes that are unhelpful to the manager, feel so competent to pass
sweeping judgment on whole classes of management issues.

Our society is accumulating resource/environmental problems at an alarming
rate, and it is usually easy to identify a "manager" upon whom to lay the
blame. What is not at all clear is where such a manager might have found
useable knowledge (in the sense of Ravetz 1986) to avoid the problem,
or useable knowledge to design corrective actions once the problem had
emerged.

Levins (1966) argued that there are three characteristics of a hypothesis, and
natural resource management plans are, above all, hypotheses. The plans are
hypotheses at grand temporal and spatial scales, but they are
hypotheses. Interpreted for present purposes, the three characteristics are:
(1) the precision with which the management system can be implemented and
measured in time and geographic space; (2) the functional realism of actions
invoked in the plan relative to function in the target system; and (3) the
level of generality expected in applying the plan (interpreted from
Levins). In management of natural systems such as forests, these three
properties of models are mutually exclusive (Baskerville 1994). That is,
anything gained in the way of precision in a model used to forecast the management design for a 200,000-ha forest tends to result in reduced generality of application in the real forest and in
reduced functional realism of the plan relative to the real forest.
Similarly, gains in making a model more generally applicable to an array of
conditions tend to result in losses of functional realism with respect to
forest dynamics, and of precision relative to any one particular forest
estate to which the model might be applied.

This principle is helpful in understanding the stress between renewable
resource scientists and renewable resource managers. Great precision in a
forecast from a scientist's model that lacks functional realism in key areas
of dynamics, at the scale of management, is a liability when it comes to
designing management in the real forest. However, scientists are not rewarded
at all for generality, and rather little for functional realism; the reward
system in contemporary science seems to be locked on precision. Hence, science models
rarely are usable/informative in real resource management decision making.

I no longer expect a "scientist" to think/work/write in the temporal and
spatial domains in which the manager of a forest must work. Scientists do not
collect data in that context, they do not publish in that context, and they do
not read much that is in that context because, at that scale, it cannot
be scientific with the classic contemporary focus on precision.
Equally, I no longer expect a forest manager to be troubled with the abstractly
small temporal and spatial scales of the scientific literature, because these
have no context in management problems at scales the manager must face.

So what to do? It is unlikely that the world of science, in which numbers and precision of publications count heavily in advancement of the scientist, will change.
Assessment of managerial accomplishment is driven by the state of the forest, as
assessed primarily in an economic context, and that also is unlikely to change.
It would be refreshing to see more scientific literature that attempted to help
the manager improve the form, function, and outcome of management at the
temporal and spatial scales at which the manager manages, rather than
continually reasserting an alternative paradigm that is unusable by real
managers in real natural systems.

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